Raed
al-Saleh says that before Syria’s civil war he could never have
imagined the position that he is in today. A former electronics
trader from the northwestern town of Jisr al-Shughour, Saleh, 33, is
now head of Syrian Civil Defense, a volunteer force dedicated to rescuing
victims of bombings and shellings. The 3,000-member group, also known as
the “White Helmets,” are first responders at the scenes of airstrikes by
Russian and Syrian government forces, pulling survivors from the rubble of
collapsed apartment buildings and homes.

Saleh
spends most of his time between Turkey and opposition-held areas of northern
Syria, but is currently visiting the United States to promote Civil Defense’s
work as well as a new Netflix documentary about
the group. Soft-spoken and reserved, Saleh expresses deep
frustration over the civil war that upended his quiet life,
thrusting him almost by accident into an extremely dangerous occupation.
“Starting from 2011, after the government’s crackdown began, I started
helping with humanitarian relief and the evacuation of wounded people
in our area following attacks,” he told The Intercept during an interview in
New York this week. “We got experience from this practical
work and later received some training from a Turkish
NGO. By 2013, we started to do search and rescue work after
airstrikes, and that year created the Civil Defense.”

The
group’s work has garnered international attention, including a Nobel Peace
Prize nomination as well as the Netflix documentary, which is titled “The White
Helmets.” The film chronicles the experiences of several members of a
Civil Defense unit in Aleppo, following them between missions as they
spend time with their families, conduct training, and reflect on their
reasons for volunteering with the group. It also includes harrowing footage of
government airstrikes on the city. The aftermath of many such aerial
attacks, recorded by Civil Defense members and broadcast on social media, has
provided crucial evidence of government war crimes and attacks against civilian
targets.

But
the attention the group has received has also made it a
target of the Syrian government and the Russian forces that support it. In
recent days, Russian airstrikes reportedly struck three Civil
Defense headquarters in Aleppo, destroying one of the few lifelines
available to civilians in the besieged city. “They are not happy that
there is a success story in Syria that is receiving attention from the world,”
says Saleh. “They are targeting us because we have become a critical
source of information about what is happening in Aleppo. We document the
attacks against civilian neighborhoods, and we pass the messages from the
ground to the world.”

Civil
Defense is one of the only aid organizations still operating in these
bleak circumstances. For supporters of the Syrian government, the
group, which has received funding from the U.S. Agency for International
Development, has become the subject of lurid conspiracy theories,
including accusations that they are part of
a Western-orchestrated plot for regime change. Saleh is weary of
these claims, saying that they are divorced from the reality of events in
Syria. Civil Defense’s code of conduct includes
a pledge of political neutrality, and the group rescues victims of bombings
regardless of political persuasion.

“We
are not asking for anything, except the implementation of the resolutions and
agreements asking for an end to the indiscriminate bombings, besiegement,
torture and use of chemical weapons by the regime,” Saleh says. “We know
that the resolutions to stop these things are not being implemented
in Syria because there is no respect for them. There needs to be a
political will to stop this catastrophe.”

The
Syrian government has recently reiterated its intention to retake opposition-held
areas of Aleppo by force. Too weak to accomplish this goal on its own, it has
relied on Russian air support as well as ground forces supplied by regional
allies. In the last few weeks, hundreds of civilians have
reportedly been killed by strikes conducted by Russian and Syrian warplanes,
which have been accused of indiscriminately targeting civilian areas of
the city. An airstrike last week destroyed a
humanitarian convoy organized by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, killing at least
20 people in an attack that has been widely blamed on the Russian government.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has decried the
attacks as likely war crimes, saying that the situation in Aleppo
resembled a “slaughterhouse.”

Since a
brief ceasefire in Aleppo collapsed last week,
Russian officials have vowed to continue
fighting until opposition-held areas of the city are recaptured by the
Syrian government. The forthcoming battle could be one of the biggest of
Syria’s long-running civil war. Before the war, Aleppo was Syria’s largest
city, and as many as 300,000 civilians live in opposition-held areas there. The
joint Russian-Syrian assault has led to fears of revenge killings and
disappearances against the civilian population if government forces regain
full control.

Saleh
says that the work of the Civil Defense in Aleppo and elsewhere will
continue despite the intensifying onslaught. Over 130 Civil Defense
members have been killed in the line of duty since the organization was founded
in 2013, including many who were killed in “double-tap” airstrikes
intended to target rescuers. Though the civil war and his role in it have
changed his life irrevocably, Saleh says that he and other Civil
Defense members are driven to continue their work by religious conviction.
The Civil Defense’s motto “to save one life is to save all of humanity,”
is adapted from a verse in the Quran.

“There
are hundreds of thousands of people living in Aleppo under daily bombings,”
Saleh says. “They do not have anyone else to call on for support,
so we are willing to take any risk to provide it.”

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs